Monday, January 17, 2011

Ever since I introduced 3D timelines back in May 2008, we have received many requests from people who want to use our interactive 3D presentations to display information that goes beyond events with calendar dates.

I am excited to announce to you today, that version 3 will allow you to chart anything in an interactive chart. Anything that can be represented with a number, that is.

When you create a new document, you will be presented with three timeline types to choose from. The first is "Dates & Times" which bases events on dates that could be circled on a calendar, or pointed to on a clock. Up until this point, every timeline you made was in this category. Examples include:

1/17/11 10:28 AM

10:28 AM

7 de agosto de 2009

590 B.C.

2009年8月7日

January 17, 2011

Last week, I announced Geological Scale timelines. This type allows timeline spans in the billions, trillions, or quintillions of years. Examples include:

5 Billion BCE

1.3 Trillion

5,000,000,000,000,000,000 CE

The third timeline type, and the answer to last week's Guess the New Feature post, is called Quantities and it allows you to chart anything that can be represented with a number. It works by allowing you to specify a prefix or suffix for the numbers in a chart. Here are some examples:

$150,000.00 USD

Day 3

Page #520

Mile 253

60 Hz

1.52 ㎟

0

Note that number lines charted with the Quantities type will include a zero in the number scale. The date-based types do not because there is no "year zero" in the Gregorian Calendar.

I'd like to point out that any of these three types can be displayed in a 3D presentation or published to the web. Also, any of the three types can be customized with our new Custom Date Labels feature for even greater flexibility.

We are really excited to see what new kinds of charts you will make with this new flexibility!

I think I'll be using this for timetables where we talk about "week 2", "week 3" etc at the planning stage rather than specific dates. Very, very handy. Wish I had it now, in fact! Could really use it on a project I'm involved in.I can see it being useful for project planning in general, as well, where we talk about months or weeks, but not about specific dates. Very nice.

Yes! As a transactional attorney, I have been looking for a way to explain the elder law journey or the process of designing an estate plan. Elise will attest that I've been trying every way possible to get this done – and now, finally, Timeline can do it.